Randy
Worst Soccer Club in Austin! Don't do it!
There are so many things wrong with this club, just save yourself the headache and go to ANY other club in the area and you'll have a better experience. First of all, if you notice right away that the club is not a fit for your child and wish to leave, this club is going to 100% hold your child's player card hostage until all financial obligations (I'll get to this shortly) are met. When you actually pay attention to the little things, you can see where a lot of the club is setup as a cash grab and they will refuse to work with you because they want "their" money. The way that they schedule practices and very small practice space is just crazy. If you simply observe the fields this club uses at 1849 Park compared to the other separate clubs that also have field space at the same park, you'll see that the PFC club packs as many teams on their space as possible and teams are practicing on fields usually smaller than a 20ydx20yd square. It's like this EVERY day and then when the kids get into games, they have a serious issue adjusting to the real size of the field they are being asked to play on. Teams also receive "blanket" training curriculum from leadership that multiple teams work on each week. Why should one team need to work on something that might not be an area they need to actually address? They'll spend all practice training in the small area assigned to them on something that realistically should take 15 minutes and then be surprised when they show up in games and look clueless when their opponents seem to have had no problem covering everything really needed to prepare them for success in the game. The club is also very slow to do many things and seems very reactive to what has happened rather than be proactive and make decisions before major issues arise. In our case, our son was on a team that he was clearly well ahead of his peers in terms of skill and I mean it was super obvious. So instead of moving him up to an older team, which he for sure could play on, they keep him down on the team they started him with (I don't know if it was just to honestly give that team some chance of scoring a goal or what) and then go to their first tournament of the season all the way in Houston and get absolutely embarrassed! They lose each game by at least 6 goals and the only goal scored happened to be by our son, but the problem is that the kids never should have been placed in this situation to begin with and many of them had a rude awakening from the experience. This type of stuff does not build up kids confidence and their ability at all. We saw it for what it was and knew it was time to leave and notified them the following Monday or Tuesday after the tournament that weekend. Now to the financial obligations, when talking with club leadership regarding our decision, which we stated we were firm on prior to having the meeting, they wanted feedback and to confirm know our reasoning, which we were fine giving them so that they could hopefully take and try to improve going forward (this is what most sports organizations do in these situations). Long story short, leadership just wanted to talk to tell us tomorrow finish paying them as we were paying monthly and no matter what I told them from our list of concerns, the main guy from leadership talking would say "I just want to remind you that you made all financial commitment" (he seriously said this at least 4 or 5 times throughout the conversation). Our response to him when he would say this is that yes, we made a commitment based on what we thought was going to be a club that also made a commitment to its players and their families to provide high-level training and skills progression, which is clearly not the case. Every single time I would remind him of the club's commitment to us, he would try to ignore it or change the subject to something else and notice directly address that glaring issue. He even went as far as to start questioning my and my wife's athletic background, which we were both D1 athletes and I have extensive coaching experience in multiple sports but not soccer (wife was soccer player and we also have 2 other kids that also play on other clubs). We agreed to disagree and left that meeting without a resolution. We then proceeded to get US Soccer involved and tried repeatedly to contact other club leadership only to basically be given the run around and have next to ZERO effort put in on the clubs part to contact us. Meanwhile, our son is stuck in limbo not being able to play with a new club while PFC could care less. After a MONTH of trying to resolve this, we hear from someone on leadership that it is took me a week and a half to be given their contact info, that a meeting would happen the following week and they'll let us know their decision. We didn't hear back after the meeting. We paid after thatcand just wanted to move on. You have been warned!